Newvem expands to monitor Azure and Amazon clouds

Newvem, which sells a tool that allows users to track and optimize their use of cloud computing resources, has expanded its software's functionality to monitor not just Amazon Web Services, but now Microsoft Azure now as well.

Introducing a beta version of Newvem Analytics for Windows Azure is significant for a couple of reasons. First of all, it points to the maturation of Microsoft's cloud offering, which some see as a legitimate competitor to the market-leading AWS cloud.

Second, it points to some interesting dynamics within the Amazon partner network. During the past year, Amazon has begun rolling out monitoring and tracking features into its service, which are similar to those provided by Newvem. In a way, AWS is chipping away at its third-party network and absorbing some of the tools these companies specialize in into its own offering, says Mark Levitt, a cloud analyst at Strategic Analytics. Sensing that, Newvem is expanding to other platforms.

Newvem provides customers with detailed usage statistics, as well as recommendations of which virtual machine instance types are best to use and historical data about patterns in how cloud resources are being purchased and consumed. Just recently it released a nifty tool called Heat Map, which provides a visual representation of your cloud usage. Levitt says this is important information for customers to know about; many customers over-provision cloud resources and don't even realize it.

Meanwhile, Levitt believes that Microsoft Azure will increasingly become a serious competitor to Amazon Web Services.

Ilan Naslavsky, CTO of Newvem, says when comparing the two clouds, AWS has the advantage over Azure because it started earlier and has built up a market-leading breadth and depth of services. But Microsoft has some strengths, too. Microsoft Office tools are still extremely popular across the enterprise and Microsoft offers a common platform for customers between their on-premises Microsoft management tools and the Windows Azure public cloud. "It's ready for enterprises to take a serious look at," he says about the Azure cloud.

Network World senior writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.

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